Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the recent past, container-based deployment architectures have played a significant role in improving applications on multiple fronts, including: Containers are all-inclusive packages containing lightweight services which are easy to spawn and terminate. However, container-based deployments can comprise hundreds of individual services and their replicas spinning up and down at any moment.

As organizations adopt cloud technologies and modernize their applications, the data they generate and ingest often grows exponentially, leaving them with difficult choices for storing and using this data. Customers are beginning to explore moving away from traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) because of the data volume to be ingested, as these RDBMS often cannot handle workloads.

Traditionally, when monitoring or troubleshooting active incidents, engineers access logs directly on the source system. However, modern IT environments are now too complex, and engineers can no longer manage and analyze logs effectively this way. With the adoption of microservices and the use of cloud-native infrastructure, it’s no longer feasible.

Technical debt is a term that comes up frequently in IT organizations—whether to characterize software development, tech stack, or infrastructure. For instance, does your organization have operating systems that you keep around because they have legacy code or support an application critical to your operations, but whose vendor is long out of business? Maintaining legacy systems can be considered a form of technical debt.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve had to repeatedly help companies fix has been poor partitioning design. I’ve seen many database architectures designed in an attempt to make queries faster. While faster queries can be a product of implementing partitioning correctly for a given design, I’ve often seen query response times get much slower from implementing partitioning incorrectly for the database design.

When I started my career in information technology, I worked for a large insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, they exclusively used Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Even as Microsoft Outlook gained popularity and functionality, the cost of changing email clients was insurmountable, so the company continued using Lotus Notes for many years.

One of my first projects as a consultant created a web application for a small tax software company in Omaha, Nebraska. They were looking to improve their online presence by offering customers the ability to automatically obtain the license for the application. Their website would allow the customer, potentially within minutes, to gain access to their software. They hired me to develop a process with an interface to their existing system to generate a license code, store it somewhere, and then email it.